ITEMS IN VARIETY

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 48, Issue 2885, 27 March 1939, Page 6

ITEMS IN VARIETY

WORLD’S CAR DISTRIBUTION i ~—— CONDENSED INFORMATION There is now one motor vehicle for every 48 persons in the world. The total number of motoi- vehicles in operation is 43,078,630. American cars account for 30,000,000 of these. Excluding the United States, the present ratio is one car for every 137 persons. The United States has one car for every 5 persons. — The most stupendous death warrant overissued was the one King Philip of Spain put his name to in February, 1568, which sentenced as heretics the 3,000,000 people of the Netherlands. — The nearest approach to ordinary vegetable matter consumed by the Eskimo is the semi-digested moss found in the stomachs of caribou. — It takes 333 human hairs placed side by side to cover a distance of an inch. — It is estimated that the German population in the United States of direct German descent numbers at least 21,000,000. — Roosters are outnumbered by hens, and among horses and sheep, females are produced in greater numbers than males. — English is the greatest borrower among languages. Less than one-third of the words in a standard English dictionary are of Anglo-Saxon origin. — An ostrich roar is so much like that of a lion that they cannot be distingui. bed at a distance. A giraffe neither roars nor whispers; it has no a ecal cords. — During his writing career, H. G. Wells has earned more than £ 200,000, the bulk of it from royalties on his “Outline of

History,” first published in 1919

It has sold 2,000,000 copies to date. — If you were offered all the new £ 1 notes you could carry away, you’d be able to stagger off with about £ 7,000 worth—assuming you could lift 1001 b. of that currency. — Experiments have shown that a man falling from any altitude will at no time attain a downward speed or more than 118 miles an hour. — Ponderous though an elephant is, jungle records of its speeds shows that it can travel as fast as 24 X miles an hour, which is faster than Jesse Owen’s best sprinting performance, slightly under 22 miles an hour. — We call America’s discoverer Christopher Columbus, although his name in Spanish is Cristobal Colon. — The world’s population is increasing' at the rate of 30,000,000 a year. — Whiskers are the cat’s measuring rod. Pussy uses his whiskers to measure the diameter of a hole wlr'h he wishes to investigate. If the cat’s whiskers tickle on both sides when he sticks his head into an opening, he knows the hole isn’t big enough to admit his body and sensibly stays out of it. —■ An elephant’s tusk runs from 50 to 120 pounds in weight, with the ivory worth £ 1 to £ 1 10s a pound. — If you want to be exact about it, a year consists of just 3 65.2422 days. This is the reason why an extra day is added to every fourth year, called leap year.